Chapter 5 #3
The three images below were not stylistically matched, but followed a theme.
One had the weird side-on stylisation of a medieval manuscript, showing a monastic figure kneeling before a winged figure that recalled the Enderby Angel she’d seen on her way in.
And probably the one had copied the other or vice versa, but seeing the same weirdnesses reproduced with remarkable faithfulness—fidelitatis—made her shiver.
The beaked, bulging-eyed face that radiated a kind of idiot beneficence for all its horror.
The thin arms crooked into prayer in the shadow of wings that seemed more of the moth than the avian, painted with fierce and vigilant eyes so that the whole figure, at a blink, became an awful, divine countenance, the oval end of its trailing robe became the very beard of God, the V of its beak a celestial frown.
The right hand image, balancing this, was a photograph, faded sepia, two white men in immaculate shirts and shorts and pith helmets, a black man in shorts, all standing before a rock face on which was carved…
The style was very different, huge-headed, angular-bodied, and yet the thing itself was immediately recognisable, the same terrible angel as was preserved in expensive pigments on the vellum page.
A different culture’s attempt at articulating the same inexpressible thing.
Between the two was probably the oldest thing that Elena had ever seen.
It was in a glass-fronted case, resting on faded green velvet.
A piece of what she guessed was ivory or horn, yellowed with age, rounded by time.
The work was simultaneously far simpler than either of the other depictions, and yet more vital, more expressive.
The face, just great round eyes and a sharp V of a nose.
A double row of zigzag markings on each side of the notional torso to indicate arms folded inwards.
The hunch of its back, grotesque, worked deliberately from the natural curve of the medium.
And, faint at the lowest edge where wear had almost erased it, a stream of tiny stick figures dancing or running or…
The scrapbook was a baffling melange of clippings and photos.
They leafed through the ragged, heavy pages, fielding the occasional escapee where old glue had dried to dust. Elena expected just more of the same, but there were only a handful of pictures that might have been of the same subject: some weird piece of French surrealism.
A photo of a Mayan icon inscrutable in its stylisation, torn from some book on history or art.
A sketch of what was apparently a stained glass window from some church somewhere, the scribbled pencil notation starting St…
but illegible beyond that. The pastel-coloured fragments came together to make something oval, the face and limbs weirdly tiny and inward, the wings of tessellated glass shards radiating outwards as figures of shepherds and Roman soldiers knelt or threw up their hands in fear and awe.
The rest of the scraps were news articles, some perhaps chronicling events where the Enderboughs had put a finger on the scales, others relating to archaeological sites, still more about advances in the biological sciences.
Elena stared at a photo of Watson, Crick and Rosalind Franklin, nervous, awkward.
The big man behind them would have fit right in at the top table at dinner.
Same broad chest and shoulders, same Enderbough face.
Elena leafed back through the book. Edward Gorey cartoons of monstrous hunched figures with tiny heads and crooked stick limbs.
A couple of staves of music, perhaps trying to recreate the unearthly singing.
Photocopies of some bizarre old manuscript, heavy with alchemical symbols.
A frontispiece in faded print: On the Infiltrationne of the Soul by one Doctor Iohannes Enderbye.
On the inside back cover of the scrapbook someone had written, in beautiful copperplate, I won’t I won’t I won’t I won’t I won’t, on and on, until the entire beige expanse was covered with ink that had turned a pale brownish-red with age.
“Someone was here before us,” Ross said, and for a moment it seemed the most banal of comments, but he meant, Someone was researching the family.
Trying to work out what was going on. “Someone who didn’t want anything to do with it either.
Maybe they found a way.” He was running through the pages of the book, backwards, forwards, as though there was some final secret hidden in the interstices between them.
“Maybe they escaped it. Whatever it was.”
“They didn’t,” said a deep, hollow voice from behind them. “But eventually they were shown why it was necessary. As we all were. As you will be.”
It was Great-Uncle Godfrey. Nobody had heard him ascend the steps. None of them had any idea how long he’d been there.
Given his words, Elena might have looked for sympathy, but his gaunt, scarred face was devoid of it, and of most things except a degree of contempt.
“It is the great tragedy of our family,” he said, “that we are born weak, and must have strength thrust upon us, before we are fit to make our way in the world.”
“Like Will?” Ross challenged him. “Is he strong, now? After what you did to him?”
“Yes,” Godfrey said simply. He loomed. There was no other word for it. And presumably he was supposed to be a hundred years old or something like Patrick had been, but when Ross moved to just push past him angrily, the boy bounced off him.
“You’ll understand soon enough, both of you,” he told them. Not even harshly, though not gently. Just a statement of fact. “Did you think you could just suckle at the teat of Enderby and not take part in what we do here? In what we are?”
“So tell us what we are,” Ross said, rubbing his shoulder where he’d run into the rock that was Godfrey.
“Because I’ve got what Melissa and Elena say they’ve seen, and I’ve got what Will and Melissa said they saw.
Something hurt Will. Something happened to Patrick and Barty and the others, because I’ve not seen any of them around recently except you.
Something is out in the woods. And there’s this—” A dismissive hand indicating the scrapbook and the display.
“And it’s just… nonsense. Conspiracy theory ravings.
So why don’t you actually just tell us? Given we’re going to find out anyway. ”
“You are.” Godfrey rolled his shoulders. In the shadows, in the fickle light of phone torches, he seemed to be growing. As though the darkness all around was a part of him, as it was a part of the family. “But she isn’t.”
He moved far too fast for an old man. Even for a man forty years younger than he was supposed to be.
The bony knot of his hand was digging into Elena’s shoulder on the instant, fingers like hungry roots, and then he had her, hauling her effortlessly into darkness, scattering the other two with her flailing limbs.
“You never bring outsiders to the feast,” Godfrey spat.
He was just a shadow in the dark, now, a shape grown monstrous in the imagination, and an anchoring grip she couldn’t dislodge.
She felt the bones in her shoulder grind.
And the attic was vast, extending on all sides into night, cluttered with a junk topography, the wan lights already just limning about the edges of all the intervening family history they’d hidden up here.
She heard Ross and Melissa shouting, banging, trying to find her, scouring the uncooperative dark.